The Global Warming Fraud Gets Waylaid‏

The Cult of the Hot Planet set suffered yet another devastating setback recently as 50 NASA astronauts, scientists and engineers signed a letter asking that the otherwise reputable agency's credibility not be sent over a cliff in support of unfounded, cultic psuedo-science. Notrickzone.com highlights the verbage of the letter sent late last month to NASA administrator Charles Bolden Jr...

"Eventually the sham is going to give, and the latest letter signed by 50 NASA experts, with more than 1000 years of combined professional experience, is a sure sign the gig’s about over.


"…..unproven remarks…..not substantiated…..hundreds of well-known climate scientists…..tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief…..science is NOT settled…..unbecoming of NASA’s history…..advocacy of an extreme position…..damage to the exemplary reputation of NASA…..even the reputation of science itself…”


Letters to the top don’t get any more blunt than that.

And how many tens of billions have these crackpots at GISS cost the taxpayers?"

Check out the list that signed to this letter if you get the chance. It contains such names as Al Worden, Richard F. Gordon Jr and Charles Duke. I'll cast my lot with that group any day over the hand-wringing Matrons of Doom advocating extremist social engineering and high taxation in the name of naturally occuring carbon dioxide.

Above photo: Space Shuttle Enterprise. I just found out only about 2 weeks ago that one of the pilots that guided the Enterprise back to earth on the maiden shuttle exercise in 1978 was astronaut Fred Haise, whose character you might remember from the motion picture Apollo 13 played by actor Bill Paxton.

The Blunt Truth Re: The Removal of Homosexuality from the list of Diagnostic and Statistical Mental Disorders by the APA

The sad fact of the matter is that homosexuality was depathologized by the American Psychological Association in 1973 NOT through the results of any sort of research or groundbreaking experiments, but through pressure, intimidation and threats levied at the group by radical gay activists. If anyone is in doubt about the preceding sentence, then they are welcome to cite the specific study (or studies) at the time that the APA based their decision on. I can save you the trouble of looking though, because such studies/experiments simply do not exist. Parents and Friends of ExGays and Gays (pfox.org) has a highly informative and detailed article about those on the front lines of such discussions at the time and I encourage everyone to check it out if they get the chance.

I would like to thank Ryan Sorba for putting together a great entry on the subject. Check it out at his blog if you get the chance. Here's a brief exerpt to whet your appetite...

"Despite being discredited in April of 1993 by the official journal of the American Psychological Association, American Psychologist, ('Life long hard-left political activist, psychologist and UCLA professor Evelyn') Hooker’s is the only study discussed in the APA’s 2003 amicus brief in Lawrence v. Texas, the United State Supreme court case which suspended the power of states to enforce anti-sodomy laws. Even today, more than fifty years after its publication, and fifteen years after its being exposed as contrived, her study is the only paper referenced in detail on the main website of the American Psychological Association in its discussion of “Gay” and “Lesbian” issues, as it attempts to make the case that there is no evidence for an association between Same-Sex Attraction Disorder (SSAD), Adult Same-Sex Intercourse (ASSI), and psychopathology.

The controversial claims of Hooker garnered her almost instant recognition within homosexualist circles, and in the wake of the Stonewall riots in 1969, as politics began to trump science, militant activists increasingly relied on Hooker’s study to support their demands that the APA remove homosexuality from the DSM."

It has been said that in the upcoming years, the church will increasingly become leaner and moved more towards the periphery of society as it continues to speak truth to power, no matter how inconvenient said truth is to those who don't wish to hear it. The Gay Left is doing a masterful job in arguing their position from a historical standpoint by comparing the advancement of the extremist homosexual agenda with the civil rights struggles of the 1960's when the comparison couldn't be any more faulty if they tried. All such activists need are people to rally around their cause utilizing emotional rather than factual arguments and they can experience success. Given that the majority of leftist talking points are based on emotion rather than FACTS, such activists already have a built-in audience of uncritically thinking lemmings to peddle their nonsense to and convince that they are somehow advancing 'rights' when nothing could be further from the truth.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that Mike Goeke hit one outta the park with his latest entry over at Baptist Press as to how the church should consider and proceed on the topic of homosexuality. Link

Will Anomalocaris eyesight prove to be daunting for Darwinists?

If an important component of Darwinian theory is that "the highly complex species of today gradually evolved from earlier, simpler organisms" then Anomalocaris is an anomaly of the highest order (see video animation here). A recent article points out how highly complex the eyes of Anomalocaris and anything comparable is seldom seen in nature to this day...

"Bizarrely, the eyes of Anomalocaris were positioned on stalks on the side of the animal's head. The popular science media are abuzz about a recent discovery -- published in Nature and based on fossils found on Kangaroo Island, South Australia -- that Anomalocaris possessed compound eyes similar to those that modern insects and arthropods have today. The only difference is that Anomalocaris had even more lenses per eye (according to the Paterson et al. Nature article, as many as 16,000 hexagonal lenses per eye) than most of those modern groups do. These remarkable eyes (which presumably would have required a reasonably advanced brain) would have afforded the creature very sharp vision..."

The above article goes on to quote a New Scientist article which states...

"Very few modern animals, particularly arthropods, have eyes as sophisticated as this," says Paterson. Houseflies, for instance, have a mere 3000 lenses. The only comparable species are some predatory dragonflies that have up to 28,000 lenses in each eye."

I'm sure that the leadership within the Cult of the Dead Scientist is already scrambling to reassure their adherents concerning this latest problem this poses for their preferred fairy-tale beliefs. Perhaps something along the lines of finally junking Natural Selection in favor of Biased Mutation or Genetic Drift will keep the congregation happy and sufficiently obfuscate the matter for the time being. And if all else fails, they always have Genetic Flow that they can appeal to. How convenient.

The Fairy Tale of the Walking Whale

The most amusing thing about this most recent discovery is that it is an absolute given that the science fetishists will either A. try and rationalize this complete change of the evolutionary timeline in whale development or B. Downplay the discovery as if they had their doubts about the entire timeline all along...

"In an article titled "Ancient whale jawbone found in Antarctica", the Associated Press reports that paleontologists have found "the oldest fully aquatic whale yet discovered," which is about 49 million years old. As we've discussed here on ENV in the past, whale evolution has faced problems because of the short timescale (~10 million years) allowed by the fossil record for whales to evolve from fully terrestrial mammals to fully aquatic whales. As Richard Sternberg has argued (see here, here or here), the many anatomical changes necessary to convert a land-mammal to a whale could not take place by Darwinian evolution even in 10 million years. There just isn't time. But this new fossil might imply that the amount of time available was actually less than 5 million years.

Until now, the whale series went something like this:
Pakicetids (fully terrestrial): ~50 mya
Ambulocetids (semi-aquatic): 49 mya
Remingtonocetids (semi-aquatic): 49 mya
Rodhocetus (a Protocetid, semi-aquatic): 47 mya
Basilosaurids (fully aquatic): 40 mya

So under the previous timeline, Darwinian biologists didn't have to worry about accounting for the origin of fully aquatic whales until about 40 mya. This new find pushes fully aquatic whales back to 49 mya. Now the timeline looks something like this:

Pakicetids (fully terrestrial): ~50 mya
New Fossil Jawbone (fully aquatic whale): 49 mya
Ambulocetids (semi-aquatic): 49 mya
Remingtonocetids (semi-aquatic): 49 mya
Rodhocetus (a Protocetid, semi-aquatic): 47 mya
Basilosaurids (fully aquatic): 40 mya"

Dr David Berlinsky mentions the monumental obstacles that evolution would have had to overcome in this particular example in this short, two minute video from a couple of years ago. I admit that I found such claims to be highly dubious from the start and it seems that my suspicions were proven correct. (Above: So-called whale predecessor Pakicetus)


"In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale."—Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859 and 1984 editions), p. 184. Link

Colebatch: Evolution Needs to Evolve

Hal G.P. Colebatch makes it known that he doesn't necessarily believe in a young earth or even that we came from Adam and Eve. But he raises matters that even the most evangelical of materialists would have difficulty and struggle to provide an explanation...

"If a monkey was born capable not only of gathering nuts and bananas but also of building cathedrals, writing Hamlet or flying to the moon, we would see it as a major objection to the pure theory of evolution. We might even be tempted to believe that a God had intervened somewhere along the line.

But Man is born capable of doing these things and has done them. The fact speaks for itself. Further, as far as paleontology can tell us, Cro-Magnon Man, the earliest form of Homo sapiens, had brains as good as modern men -- Cro-Magnon Man simply knew less. We know from cave paintings that 16,000 years ago at least Man had highly developed art.

Why? Art is useless for survival. There is no reason why evolution should have produced it. It is possible to be reminded of Gandalf's cryptic comment in The Lord of the Rings: "Something else is at work." (About Neanderthal Man we can only make guesses from a few ambiguous hints -- in at least one Neanderthal burial, for example, a dead body was found to have been buried bedecked with flowers. Why did the dead Neanderthal's fellow-tribesmen take time off from hunting and gathering food to do that? Further, there were different types of Neanderthal Man and the more we discover about them the more complex the picture becomes.)

The unique quality of the human brain is one of the things which evolution, and Professor Dawkins, fails to explain. Humanity is special, and evolution can give no reason for it. Shall we perhaps be so unkind as to paraphrase Professor Dawkins, and call anyone who believes these things to be fully explained -- with that explanation being perhaps that they are the result of blind chance -- "ignorant, stupid or insane"?"

Berlinski on the Scientific Pretensions of Atheism

I just thought I'd throw this out there for anyone who might be interested in evolution. Human Events has posted a 5 part, videotaped interview with Dr. David Berlinski. The bulk of the interview is concerning questions about his book The Devil's Delusion, Atheism and it's Scientific Pretensions. To begin viewing the interview put out by the Hoover Institution, just click here.

EDIT: Youtube has a large part of the DVD The Incorrigible Dr. Berlinski here.

Myers: 'Who the hell is JD Curtis?'

Two days ago, this blog was the recipient of a comment by perhaps the most widely known commenter it has seen has (so far) ever seen. While I know Vox Day has stopped by here a couple of times and given me the honor of creating a few threads on his blog Vox Popoli relating to subjects I have raised, (see here and here) he didn't actually leave a comment here.



PZ (Paul Zachary) Myers "is a liberal atheist and evolutionist activist in the creation-evolution controversy, contributing to The Panda's Thumb and Pharyngula blogs. Myers is also an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota Morris (UMM)." Here is a brief video clip of him speaking from when he appeared in the Ben Stein movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. I first came to to hear about Myers through the first article I ever read by Day on World Net Daily which detailed the whole, sordid Communion Host Affair. Myers has apparently adopted the Run And Hide Method of Argumentation when called out on his positions and challenged by Day.


The thread that Myers commented on is viewable by clicking here. I'm quite sure this actually was Myers given that he cross-posted his comments on his own blog, Phyrangula.


Setting aside for a moment the dodginess of requiring someone to argue from the arguments raised by a particular person from a particular book (in this case, Ann Coulter's Godless: The Church of Liberalism) it is quite possible that I will take up Myers on his offer. I would first, of course, have to obtain a copy of Godless and peruse it for a relevant starting point, but I'm sure that it's not entirely outside of the realm of possibility.



What do you think of this offer by Myers?

Romney backtracks re: latest scientific fad

Meanwhile in other "settled science", Mitt Romney appears to be backpedaling away from earlier statements he has made concerning anthropogenic global warming.

"Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, assailed by Republicans for saying climate change is a scientific fact, appeared to alter his position by saying he doesn't think the issue merits substantial government action.


During a townhall meeting in Lebanon, New Hampshire, the former Massachusetts governor was asked whether he believed humans were contributing to temperatures creeping upwards. Romney responded that humans play some role, but that it's not clear what.

"Do I think the world's getting hotter? Yeah, I don't know that but I think that it is," Romney said. "I don't know if it's mostly caused by humans."

"What I'm not willing to do is spend trillions of dollars on something I don't know the answer to," he added."

I generally like Romney and find him to be quite affable. However it must be frustrating to even his most ardent supporters that the guy will so easily change his position if he thinks that a different perspective would improve his standing.

Don't get me wrong, in real world experience alone the guy is head and shoulders above someone like Obama who never so much as managed a hot dog stand before becoming president. Actually, almost any of the GOP declared candidates would be better than Obama IMO.

EDIT: Special thanks to Mr. Day for posting the latest real science on the subject from researchers in Switzerland which seems to point towards climate change being more heliocentric (as opposed to anthropogenic) than was previously thought possible.

Evolutionists promoting 'junk science' in Texas

While the blind followers of Darwinian evolutionary theory claim to be on the side of 'Science', their actions seem to indicate otherwise. A recent analysis of textbooks offered for study in the curriculum of the state of Texas revealed the following, glaring errors. Evolution and Views informs us of the discredited instances of macroevolutionary 'support' being offered up as fact...

• "Erroneous statements that the 1950s Miller-Urey origin of life experiment produced amino acids under conditions that accurately simulated the early earth.
  
  
  





• Long-discredited claims that the appendix, tonsils, and other organs are non-functional "vestigial" organs left over from a blind evolutionary process. In fact, these organs are now recognized by scientists to serve important biological functions.
  
  





• Fraudulent embryo drawings originating with nineteenth-century German racist Ernst Haeckel that are used to claim that vertebrate embryos are the same at the earliest stages of development (not true).
  
  





• Some curricula claim that the prevalence of dark moths over light moths is due to moths naturally resting on tree trunks in the wild where they are eaten by birds, failing to report the empirical data questioning this claim.
  
  






• Some curricula promote the Galápagos finches as if they provide evidence for adaptive radiation, failing to mention that the finches are highly similar and can even interbreed.

And on it goes. When will the science-fetishists ever pause for a moment and consider the so-called evidence that they would have children learn? For a more complete explanation on why the Miller-Urey experiment was incomplete and did not work, just click here. In the meantime, I find it quite amusing that the evolutionists don't even bother to police themselves in the propogation of such embarrasing, junk science.

Fighting Intolerance in Tennessee

The contraversy in Tennessee over whether to pass House Bill 368 is beginning to heat up. The bill would encourage...

"The state board of education, public elementary and secondary school governing authorities, directors of schools, school system administrators, and public elementary and secondary school principals and administrators shall endeavor to create an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that encourages students to explore scientific questions, learn about scientific evidence, develop critical thinking skills, and respond appropriately and respectfully to differences of opinion about controversial issues."

What could be wrong with that? A whole host of things if the reaction by some people is any indication. Robin D. Zimmer Ph.D. weighs in and spells out why such a bill is a good idea..

"Those who oppose the bill seem to be focused on the teaching of evolution as a non-controversial fact. But are there controversies associated with theories such as full Darwinian macroevolution? Sure there are. Michael Behe, a biochemist from Lehigh University, recently published a book entitled: The Edge of Evolution, the Search for the Limits of Darwinism. In it he notes that plasmodium bacteria, which cause malaria, have developed resistance to new drugs. This is indeed a form of evolutionary change through adaptation. But why is it that these bugs have not evolved significantly in other ways? Why is it that malaria is still confined to the tropics and has not evolved to thrive in more temperate regions? He then argues that there are limitations or boundaries to classic Darwinian evolution. Dr. Behe is not alone in questioning apparent boundaries.

I am not writing to argue for or against macroevolution or any other scientific theory. But the bottom line is that critical thinking and analysis fosters good science. For high schoolers, their love of science and acumen for it will not come from memorizing and repeating textbook prose, but rather by diving into the strengths and weaknesses of theories such as evolution."

Zimmer is exactly right. Why not present arguments from both sides? What could it hurt? It would only enable the students to sharpen their skills in critical examination of competeing theories. This segues neatly into a cute comment on the recent Myth of Horse Evolution thread from GS...

"The split between any two of those species may be farther back than previously thought, but that doesn't kill the principle behind the theory. Real scientists work hard to sort that shit out and advance our understanding. Of course, if creationist observers insist on limiting their evidence to fossils-only, it kind of looks like they have a case to make."

Although not rightfully defined as "Creationism" there are Intelligent Design theorists who are having papers reviewed all the time. Such as the "work of Douglas Axe who published articles in 2000 and 2004 in the Journal of Molecular Biology, Michael Behe and David Snoke who published in 2004 in Protein Science, and Axe again in 2010 in BIO-Complexity, a peer reviewed journal for testing ID claims. From my reading, all these papers cast doubt on natural selection acting on random mutations as a source of new information." Link

Here's an even more extensive list with various links that includes not only peer-reviewed papers but entire peer-reviewed books on the topic of Intelligent Design. And given the past treatment of evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg, one can clearly see the prevailing prejudices that currently exist in academia at this time. It's really no wonder that there aren't even more such papers in the public domain. In short, we can see this issue is far from settled and a little debate can be a healthy thing for young learners in Tennessee and elsewhere.

UPDATE: Whoever had 19 in the office pool as to how many days it would take for some rigid Darwinist to make a comparison to the psuedo-history of the Scopes Trial with House Bill 368, you're the winner.

"Even John Washington Butler would be disturbed by this bill. He was the Tennessee state representative who, in 1925, introduced the Butler Act, which criminalized the teaching of evolution or any other principle than the creation story given in the Bible. That act led to the arrest of biology teacher John Scopes and what became known as the "Scopes Monkey Trial,'' one of the more infamous moments in Tennessee's history."

Such is one's lifeview when they allow their perceptions to be affected by a biased and error-filled Hollywood movie like Inherit the Wind (pictured above). Does anyone want to give odds on how long it will be before the obligatory Taliban comparisons are foolishly spouted off?

The Myth of Horse Evolution

I've been meaning to do a series of posts lately based on a book I started to crack open by James Montgomery Boice entitled Genesis Volume I, Creation and Fall, An Expositionary Commentary and given the interest the bacteria flagellum thread has generated, I just thought I'd throw this out there for discussion. On page 45, Boice writes...

"[A] major problem with the use of fossils to support evolution is the subjective nature of arranging fossil histories. It might be argued...that there is nevertheless evidence for development within one of the ancient time periods, even if not from one to the other. The supposed development of the horse from the Eocene period to modern times is an oft-cited example. During 60 million years or so the horse is supposed to have increased in size, lengthened its limbs, reduced and then eventually discarded toes and became a grazer. Many museums have skeletons or pictures that are supposed to represent this development. But the fossils do not prove this development. They may suggest it, and the development they suggest may in fact be right. But there is still no evidence that one supposed form of the horse gave place to another. In actuality the skeletons may have come from similar but otherwise unrelated animals. Moreover, even if the fossils of these horselike animals prove a development, it is still not an example of the development of a new species but only of a change within a species."

So what is your take on all of this? I agree with Boice in that a case could be made of change over time but at this point, we just don't know yet and cannot argue as if this example of evolutionary change is a cold, hard FACT.

Bacteria Flagellum not refuted

Casey Luskin raises some interesting points for those who are convinced that the bacteria flagellum is a poor example of intelligent design. The entire article is a bit technical but feel free to comment on it here. It appears that Luskin is personally engaging the public in the comment section below the article so feel free to direct a question towards him. I personally found the following comment to be quite interesting...

"I used to be anxious that taking a lot of Biology and Biochemistry classes would challenge my faith. Then I took Metabolism, Cell Biology, and Immunology. What I discovered was such mind-blowing complexity that it's impossible to believe there wasn't some kind of Designer anymore. More education caused me to become more religious. Professors will try to offer naturalistic explanations for everything, and it's tempting to believe them because the have a PhD. However, once you start asking yourself if their explanations really make sense instead of taking their word for it, purely naturalistic evolution starts looking like the biggest hoax in the history of science."

Adios Tiktaalik, We Hardly Knew Ye

All Hail The Mighty Mudskipper From Whom the Tetrapods Arose! Heh-heh. Just having a little fun at the expense of the Darwinists out there. But does anyone else recall the hype concerning the finding of Tiktaalik? Why, it just happened to occur at the time that the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School Disctrict trial was happening and thus, the discovery was touted as a confirmation in the predictive ability of evolutionary biologists. After all, they theorized where such a transitional species could be found in the fossil record and Viola!, there it was! If youre wondering why there hasn't been much gloating about Muddy Mudskipper's Tiktaalik's discovery as of late, I think this edition of Nature Magazine provides a reason why...

"The oldest known tracks of a four-limbed land animal could rewrite part of vertebrate evolution.

Some prints, showing individual digits, were found in limestone slabs unearthed in a quarry near Zachełmie, Poland, dated to about 395 million years ago — more than 18 million years before tetrapods were thought to have evolved.

The tracks suggest that the animals that made them were up to 2.5 metres long and had a footpad up to 26 centimetres wide, although most prints were about 15 centimetres wide, reports a team of Polish and Swedish scientists in Nature this week. This would mean that large, land-roaming tetrapods would have coexisted for 10 million years with the elpistostegids — including Tiktaalik roseae, which lived 375 million years ago — a group thought to mark the transition of from fish to land-roaming animals.."

Casey Luskin of the Discovery Intitute catalogs in great detail all of those who fell for this farce initially. They include such organizations and publications as The National Academy of Sciences, TIME Magazine, PBS/NOVA and others who all lauded the discovery and BTW, shame on those ignorant design theorists who are trying to intentionally mislead us. Now we know the truth and evolutionists do not appear to be any closer to proving when such a creature first arose, if it arose at all or what the creature actually was that rose from the water to walk on land.